11 - Medicine and Public Health

Summary

'Nature and sickness'

In no other subject discussed in this volume, except possibly the natural and physical sciences, has there been so fundamental a break between past and present as there has been in the development of medicine and public health. Unless we can leap back across that gap and regard what we find on the other side without the superiority of 'hindsight' we shall never be able to appreciate fully the significance of the numerous medical allusions in Shakespeare. The emotional colouring which always surrounds sickness and death, the horror which is naturally aroused by the very thought of great epidemics of plague or smallpox, the aesthetic revulsion which is now the normal reaction to dirt, unwashed bodies and bad smells, the mixed feelings provoked by the spectacle of grave physicians consulting the stars before treating a patient, these are only a few of the obstacles which stand in the way of a fair appraisal.

The unprecedented developments in medical science and practice during the past century have brought us far from the doctors and diseases familiar in Shakespeare's world. They have also, by their complexity and by the highly technical language which has grown around them, removed the whole subject from the body of general knowledge accessible to the ordinary welleducated man or woman. In Shakespeare's day medical knowledge was as commonplace and necessary as a knowledge of other domestic skills. Medical books were just as likely to be found in any gentleman's library as literary or historical works. Families in the higher ranks of society often had their own manuscript volume of prescriptions and remedies, collected either from reading or from friends and neighbours, which was passed down from generation to generation and which even the local doctor would not disdain to consult.